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Lord Monckton and The Distinguished Professor Bada.

The Global Warming Realists are a group of scientists and other interested parties who are sceptical about the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming. One of the convenors of the group is Dr Gordon Fulks who has virtually the same qualifications as the "father of global warming," Dr James Hansen.

Gordon's writings have sometimes been published in these pages eg here and here.

Lord Christopher Monckton needs no introduction to regular readers of this blog. Jeffrey L Bada, on the other hand might not be known here. Jeffrey Bada describes himself in correspondence as a "Distinguished" Research Professor.

He has had a running series of emails with the Global Warming Realists which resulted in a reply from Lord Monckton which was published by the SPPI blog (Link) and subsequently by Jo Nova (Link)

Professor Bada replied with an email laced with dishonest ad hominems

"your dishonest claim to be in the House of Lords"

"you have fooled a lot of people in the US who think you are some sort of authority on global warming" (LCM is recognised as an expert by many including being an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

"As with the claim of being a Lord this one is false as well" (LCM IS a Lord)

and finishing with:

I am through wasting my time with you on this. We will see who is right about this in the future: the planet either stays relatively like it is today (you win); or it becomes a hot house along with all the ecological damage that would bring (I'm right). May we live so long!

Tragic that someone would like to see the earth catch on fire to prove his point. Thankfully, he will be proven wrong.

Lord Monckton Replied:

Yes, you have this straight. If you are conducting a scientific or other rational argument, introduction of irrelevances such as whether I am or am not a member of the House of Lords or whether you are or are not Distinguished is a logical fallacy. It is the unfailing mark of the lesser mind in desperation. You should vow never to do it again. You will find the fallacy well described in Aristotle's Refutations of the Sophists, a short and most interesting work in which he describes the commonest of the peripatetic fallacies, all of which are regularly trotted out by the climate-extremists. It was the realization that just about all of the arguments for panic about the climate that were being uttered by scientists on television were instances of one or other of these dozen fallacies that led me to start digging into the models, where I did not like what I saw. Aristotle went on to consider what made fallacies fallacious, and it was from his consideration of the dozen fundamental fallacies, of which ignoratio elenchi is one, that led him to develop the science and art of Logic in his Prior and Posterior Analytics.
Oh, and "deferring to the Clerk of the Parliaments" is another of the peripatetic fallacies excoriated by Aristotle: it is what the mediaeval schoolmen were later to label the argumentum ad verecundiam - the fallacy of arguing from appeal to authority or reputation.

And I am puzzled by your suggestion that I have made a "dishonest claim to be in the House of Lords". As you will see if you read the Opinion I have sent you, the answer I gave to Adam Spencer on the ABC radio, to which the Clerk objected, was "Yes, but without the right to sit and vote." You will see that the barrister says that my answer was in all respects correct, legitimate, proportionate and reasonable. Therefore, all you can really say is that because you are having such difficulty in answering the scientific points I have raised, you prefer to divert the discussion on to a subject on which - if anything - you know even less than you do about climate science, and you believe the Clerk (who knows little peerage law, and was acting without the authority of the House: check Hansard) rather than a barrister manifestly learned in peerage law, who, unlike the Clerk, has provided a reasoned Opinion of some elegance and historical depth. In short, you may legitimately argue that there are two opinions on this tricky though not important point of law: but you may not legitimately argue that in having gone to a barrister and asked him the question "Am I a member of the House of Lords?" I am dishonest in relying upon his answer. To suggest dishonesty in such circumstances is not a fallacy: it is the lie direct, and you ought to be old enough not to do that any more, even though you are on the hard Left politically and therefore an inheritor of the habit of desinformatsiya that is the enduringly ugly legacy of the KGB.

Nor am I sure what you mean about my having "fooled a lot of people in the US". Like it or not (and it is obvious that you don't), I am indeed consulted by heads of state and government, and by legislators and their advisors, not only in the US but worldwide. The reason is that, like it or not (and you don't), I have a respectable track record of being right because I do not put politics or emotion before science and reason. Years of academic discipline have taught me not to do that. This does not guarantee that I am always right, but it does mean I am at least trying to be right, and I do not allow any preconceived political notion or aprioristic approach to interfere with attempting to get at the right answer. And if one tries to be right, rather than starting from the Party Line and trying to make the science fit it, one is less likely to be wrong than someone who has simply stopped thinking altogether.

On what rational basis, if any, do you consider the planet at all likely to become a hothouse because we enrich the atmosphere by altering 1/3000 of its composition between now and 2100? Can you not see how absurdly disproportionate and emotional and unscientific such language as that of "hothouses" is?

I note that you have still not attempted to find any physical process corresponding to the singularity in the Bode feedback-amplification equation. If there is no such process, and it is reasoably clear observationally that there is not, then it is necessary to introduce a damping term into the Bode equation to make it applicable to the climate at all. But you will not be able to find any models that contain that damping term. And without it climate sensitivity in the models will be at least three times bigger than it should be.

Then there's the real significance of the bomb-test curve, which is that just about all CO2 added to the atmosphere is gone within 50 years. The residential half-life is just ten years. That's the advantage of using a marker such as 14C: its radioactive half-life is so long (5730 years) that over the short timescales we're looking at it is irrelevant. So once the 14C goes out of the atmosphere, it does not re-emerge again from the sinks into which it has sunk. That means little more than half of the increase in CO2 concentration since 1750 is anthropogenic, and that means we're going to have to divide 21st century manmade warming by almost 2 again. It's hard to imagine that we'll see more than 0.7 C warming this century from anthropogenic causes.

The other point about the bomb-test curve is that one can determine the equilibrium constant of CO2 by reference to fig. 6.1 of IPCC (2013), or 7.3 of IPCC (2007). It is 0.015, implying that if we add any CO2 to the atmosphere only 1.5% of it will remain there near-permanently. However, the Bern climate model on which all of the models imprudently rely assumes that the equilibrium constant is 0.217, implying that more than a fifth of all the CO2 we add to the atmosphere will remain there near-permanently. That is just plain silly. It flies directly in the face of the evidence. And, of course, like all of the mistakes in the models, it points in one direction only - towards an absurd exaggeration of climate sensitivity.

And it could be less than that if the IPCC's implicit time-curve for the climate-sensitivity parameter is shaped differently from what is observed. Taking just these few considerations into account, it is perfectly possible that Man's contribution to warmer weather this century could be less than half a Celsius degree: and every word I've set out here is mainstream science, though it is very carefully ignored by the IPCC and the modellers.

So let us have no more nonsense about the House of Lords. Let me hear what you think about my outline of just a few of the problems with climate sensitivity in the models. And that's before I get on to the influence of chaos theory on the predictability of climate, on which I have also published. Bottom line: there is simply not enough evidence to suppose that the temperature will be measurably warmer in 50 years' time than it is today; and it could be less than 0.5 C warmer in 100 years time, but not a lot more than that. Hothouse? Bah! - M of B

And a footnote from Dr Gordon Fulks:

Dear Lord Monckton,
I need to apologize for the bad behavior of my fellow countryman Jeffrey Bada. Although we Americans are not especially known for our good manners anyway, Jeffrey seems to be competing for the low mark. He easily outdistances Glenn Beck who once referred to you as "Lordy." Beck intended to be irreverent and humorous. Bada has no humor in him that I have seen. He intends to be nasty, as a manifestation of rage and as a distraction from his lack of substantive arguments.

That brings us to logical fallacies in all their forms. Bada unwittingly uses many of these, not because he has constructed them himself, but because he has copied them from the very extensive set used by climate alarmists. The fact that they cannot spot the many errors of logic that they employ weakens their claim to correctness even before we get to a discussion of the science.

Indeed, without sound logic, science is impossible. While most of us have little familiarity with Aristotle, I have been pleased how many ordinary people intuitively understand logical fallacies. Thanks for helping us to name some of them. Thanks also to Professor Bada for giving us many good solid examples.

Sir Henry Fraser has an impressive CV.
Barbados' newest knight, retired university professor, Dr. Henry Fraser, received the Accolade of Knight of St. Andrew, in the 2014 Independence Day Hours. Sir Henry Fraser was named as a result of The Knighthood of St. Andrew being bestowed on him for his outstanding contribution to the medical profession and representation of Barbadian culture, especially in the area of its architectural history.Sir Henry, a medical practitioner by profession, has worked for many years as a lecturer in medicine at the University of the West Indies and now serves as an Independent Senator in the Barbados Parliament where he has gained an outstanding reputation for his work on the historic treasures of Barbados.

He has received a plethora of other awards, including the UWI’s Pelican Award, Paul Harris Fellow of Rotary International and the Gold Crown of Merit (GCM) in the Barbados Honours of 1992.